Future PC notebooks to resemble ultrabook look & feel, not power

The manufacturers are probably right as the ultrabook form factor is certainly very visually appealing, so I can see there being a niche in the market for an entry level product in this form factor.


Wombler

For the same $600 you can have a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo.
IMO, that would be more appealing than a $200 premium fancy laptop casing.

Personally speaking I would agree with that but it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that seem to prefer style over value for money and practicality.


Wombler

I was looking at an asus UX series 12" & 13" earlier this week, mostly because of the metal casing, which it's stronger than the cheap plastic that makes up most laptops.

Laptops are for work. Tablets are toys. The professional sector uses tablets as control panels for advanced audio/video/switching control .... But it's all programmed on a pc first, because using tablets to accomplish anything is exceptionally laborious.

I don't know where ultrabooks fit ... I expect the "I'm on holiday & need a real PC with lots of storage to download my tiny camera storage card", but with tiny ssd's, they don't even accomplish that basic task.

That's probably where those will be and will stay. The vast majority needs a laptop that works and allows them to store and be able to have good usage and that is where the 15" fit in quite nicely and that is the most used and probably bought laptop that will fit most users pocket book without burning a hole in their pocket books. One has to just think a bit and say ultra so what sacrifices did it make to make it ultra???? Also they might not let you expand memory or hard drive or larger hard drive or SSD and that is where the Ultra gets you-you end up buying another more expensive Ultra just so you can have those features and in my play book that is a no brainer tantamount to price fixing.

I have always used the IBM/Lenovo laptops with the highest resolution, which is now 1920X1080 for a 15.6-inch screen, though of course HP and Dell offer the same resolution. So far, Apple has not matched this resolution on its laptops, but the new iPad blows the whole competition away with the incredible resolution (but on a small screen), the 9.7-inch “Retina Display,” which means 2048X1536. This is a totally new bar. Are PC laptops (Lenovo, HP, Dell) going to match this amazing resolution, on a laptop screen (say, 15.6-inch screen)? Does anybody know of any rumor?

For those of you who just use a computer to surf the internet, a tablet may be sufficient--for those of us that actually use them for work, such as Autocad; sorry a tablet just will not cut it!

But after having created your designs, don't you want to see them on the screen with the highest resolution, be it a small screen? There is nothing comparable to the new iPad in resolution. You can have a bigger screen, but the resolution will be lower, especially after you factor in the screen size. For a 15.6-inch screen, the resolution would have to shoot up past 3000 before it could match that of the new iPad.

As

That is where the real computing business lies in. And how you came to your resolution number is dubious at best. All those eye candies are worthless to justify for something that can't even compete on computing levels just like Charmedon says. There are very good reason why tablet will always be a tablet it is not a Computer. It may act and look but that is about where it ends.

The high resolution screen is just a gimmick - there's no real reason to produce a screen resolution higher than 1920xZZZZ (top suit screen size ration).

There is no content available for that high resolution, and the tablets screen size and interface really aren't useful for work.

30" computer screen resolutions are typically 2560x1600 (16:10) /2560x1440 (1440p /16:9) or 2560x1920 (4:3), but while the 2048x1536 resolution is available for the "new ipad", there's a well argued case that practically no-one will ever be able to determine the difference over 1080p regardless.

The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between a 720p and 1080p TV on anything smaller than a 40" at a few feet.
Those large 80"-120" advertising TV walls (using actual TV's, not those crappy sports TV's with chunky LEDs) are all driven at 1080p ... and until you're up close and personal, no-one could tell.

It's nice that the resolution has increased, to match my 2 year old Galaxy Tab 7", but the resolution is overkill and the content will look worse because playing readily available (1080p) video's will result in interpolated pixels, which is inferior to a native (matching) resolution.